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Information design

Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. (source: Wikipedia)

Beyond prototype fidelity: environmental and social fidelity

Added on 19 February 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) environmental fidelity, social fidelity, and prototype fidelity need to be employed and manipulated throughout the design process to bring to our projects the generative ideas, validation, ability to see, play and iterate something that previously was only imagined, and the concrete conversation starters that let us talk and think with our teams and stakeholders.” – (Paula Wellings – Adaptive Path blog)

Is Good Design Replicable?

Added on 10 February 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The implicit assumption is that if you perform some particular UX method then you’ll produce consistently better design: the right process = the right product. So, the obvious question to ask is: Is there evidence that someone following a certain process produces great design every time?” – (Joshua Porter – Bokardo)

EG: The Entertainment Gathering

Added on 4 February 2009 Peter Bogaards
Making Information Entertaining and Entertainment Informative – “How do you explain EG? It’s a bit like music. But talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Music taps feelings so deep and so special that we don’t have words for them. Music names them for us. You can’t explain music in words.” (Richard Saul Wurman)

Taken Out of Context

Added on 19 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
“As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.” (Danah Boyd – apophenia)

Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore…

Added on 22 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Meredith Davis’s presentation addresses the rapidly growing gap between where we should be going in the practice of design and longstanding assumptions about design education. It is about the disorienting relationship between what and how we teach design in colleges and universities and the circumstances of twenty-first century life and work; about the worldview against which we construct the content and pedagogy of professional design education.” (Meredith Davis – Massaging Media 2)

Sharism: A Mind Revolution

Added on 17 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Sharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. (…) With the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create? A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.” (Isaac Mao – FreeSouls.cc)

Conclusion of Boost Chats

Added on 10 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“The problem lies partly in how individuals define their role: if they insist on their right to behave individualistic, there is a problem because this means they see merely to their own wellbeing. If they on the contrary perform their individualism, they contribute with their individuality (competence, inclination, ability etc.) to a general wellbeing where nature is included. Individualistic behaviour leaves little room for empathy and lacks realisation that the resulting choices affect wellbeing negatively as this always is part of a greater whole: contextual.” (Designboost: Sharing Design Knowledge)

Nine Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer

Added on 8 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“It’s probably the least glamourous part of web design, but information design is by no means the least important. Locating and consuming information is the quintessential web task, far surpassing buying, playing and communicating, all of which include a good portion of information design themselves. How users find and then avail themselves of all that information is affected by how it is structured and presented. Thus every web designer should be equipped to make qualified and informed decisions on just how to do this.” (Collis – PSDTUTS) – courtesy of janjursa

The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them

Added on 3 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning. Figure 1 shows an example of a concept map that describes the structure of concept maps and illustrates the above characteristics.” (Cmap Tools – Publications)

Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work

Added on 18 November 2008 Peter Bogaards
“(…) a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.” (Jacob Burghardt – Flashbulb Interaction)

The Design Manifesto

Added on 13 November 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Here is the ‘manifesto’ of our Global Agenda Council/Design group that came out of an amazing day of discussion in Dubai about the financial/economic crisis and what design thinking can do to help reshape the big issues of the day. It is an excellent summary of the state of art of design and innovation.” (Bruce Nussbaum) – courtesy of marcelzwiers

Designing universal knowledge

Added on 30 October 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Knowledge is power. If one possesses a collection of the ‘universal knowledge’ of the world, one has ultimate power. Establishing comprehensive, global collections of knowledge already fascinated mankind thousands of years ago. Today, modern communication and information technologies offer quick and prompt collecting, high memory capacities and wide-ranging access. In addition, globalization and the Internet advance a mentality which moves away from the local and regional towards the international and universal. Collections of knowledge, such as archives, encyclopaedias, databases and libraries, also follow this trend. They are engaged in a race against time in both the technological and creative area. Their clearly formulated aim is to establish for us a complete and up-to-date collection of ‘universal knowledge’.” (Gerlinde Schuller – Information Design Studio)